'This is a book about life in a seaside village in County Down during the 1930s, and mine of vivid information, partly a census, partly an inventory; but is also a book about what it felt like to be one particularly attentive child in a family that had "observer status" because of its recent arrival in the local community. Either way it is a triumph of recollection and re-creation.
'Perhaps this air of positive equanimity is only to be expected from something like Maurice Hayes, a man with wide experience of public life and a loving familiarity with the class and cultural diversities of Ulster and Ireland. Yet the integrity of that understanding derives from a more intimate source that anything he might have learned during his time as town clerk of Downpatrick or as a civil servant at Stormont or as an office bearer with the GAA. It has to do with the combination of the innately well disposed temperament and a uniquely fair-minded, truth-sifting intelligence; it has to do also with humour and imagination; and, in the long run, it has to do with the writer in Maurice Hayes who has been biding his time for decades, accumulating and clarifying the images and insights that make SWEET KILLOUGH, LET GO YOUR ANCHOR such a remarkable literary debut'.
Seamus Heaney
'Perhaps this air of positive equanimity is only to be expected from something like Maurice Hayes, a man with wide experience of public life and a loving familiarity with the class and cultural diversities of Ulster and Ireland. Yet the integrity of that understanding derives from a more intimate source that anything he might have learned during his time as town clerk of Downpatrick or as a civil servant at Stormont or as an office bearer with the GAA. It has to do with the combination of the innately well disposed temperament and a uniquely fair-minded, truth-sifting intelligence; it has to do also with humour and imagination; and, in the long run, it has to do with the writer in Maurice Hayes who has been biding his time for decades, accumulating and clarifying the images and insights that make SWEET KILLOUGH, LET GO YOUR ANCHOR such a remarkable literary debut'.
Seamus Heaney
Used availability for Seamus Heaney's Sweet Killough